The Farm: Midland woman realizes dream

Lori Qualls

Published 9:00 pm, Thursday, August 15, 2002

Daily News NINA GREIPEL

Barbara and Bob Chapman from Midland are proud owners of the house on 1534 Parrish Road in Midland. The house was built in 1904. The second floor contains three bedrooms and a bathroom and the ground floor has a large kitchen, laundry room, living room, office and dining room.

As a girl in Kentucky, Barbara Chapman dreamed of having a farm.

"I remember sitting in school drawing pictures of a farm," the Midland woman recalled. "There was a hill here, a hill here, a hill here, a house here and a barn here and I would put my animals here," she said as she drew the map with her finger on the table top.

"I don't have my hills but I have my barns and house."

Chapman was drawing the map on the wooden table in the spacious kitchen of her 1904 two-story wood frame farmhouse in Linwood that overlooks a big red barn, a granary, an outhouse, a silo and vegetable and perennial gardens. One perennial bed, home to the original owners' peony bushes, is anchored with a giant box elder tree. The house and buildings sit on 70 acres of land, a lot of them cornfields. Chapman and her husband, Bob, bought the house and property at an auction on Sept. 19, 1999. The home belonged to Fred and Hilda Kehr, who raised three children there.

The house had been vacant four years before the Chapmans bought it, and the landscape was overgrown with trees and weeds. They initially cleared 14 trees from the land, and continue to clean the property. Debris from inside and out has kept two burn piles busy, Barbara Chapman said.

Even though the Chapmans spent two years renovating and restoring the house, Barbara Chapman, a registered nurse in the emergency room at MidMichigan Medical Center-Midland, knew from first sight it was the farm she had dreamed about.

"When I climbed the steep stairs (from the landing leading to the kitchen), I said 'This is it.' I didn't get any farther from this kitchen. I saw nothing wrong with it. I just saw what it would look like when I was done with it."

The work included thousands of hours of taking up layers of linoleum, peeling off layers of paint and wallpaper and taking apart a two-story chimney brick by brick.

The kitchen was gutted and now is white and bright with custom-made knotty pine cupboards and trim, and white appliances. The kitchen sink was moved so that Chapman could look out the kitchen's east windows, where she hopes one day to see a pond.

Both porches were changed. The back porch, which leads to the kitchen, was enclosed. It now is open and is a favorite spot for a litter of barn kittens. One of Chapman's favorite spots is the swing on the front porch, where she listens for the neighbors' horse to whinny, a cow to moo or a rooster to crow. She also watches "phenomenal" sunsets from the loft of her barn, and hopes one day to install a row of windows there.

"My whole intention was to buy an old house, fix it up and sell it," she said on her way down the staircase to the lower living area. "Now I love this house. I can't sell it."

The Kehrs' children  a son and two daughters  live on property adjacent to the Chapmans and have given Barbara old photos of the house as well as of Fred and Hilda Kehr, who are both deceased.

Still sitting at the kitchen table, Chapman strokes her cat Frick (Frack is busy looking out the window) and leafs through a scrapbook that holds the old photographs and new ones documenting the renovation and restoration.

"You can find traces and remnants (of old structures)," Chapman said, looking at black-and-white photos that show the landscape years ago. "Wire, posts from the old grape arbor. Digging around I have found lots of car parts, metal." Some tractor parts had been there so long they had become embedded into a tree, she said.

"The barns were a mess," Barbara Chapman recalled. She hired Amish people to fix the barns and paint the big one red. She would love to top the silo with a domed lid of some sort, and wondered out loud how it could be done.

A streak of dark green grass follows the path that once led from a back door to the pig house. That building is gone, and the site now is home to her compost pile.

Nearby, the outhouse, "a two-seater," now is her potting shed, and surrounded by stands of yellow and dark purple hollihocks. Hollihocks were commonly planted around an outhouse, Chapman said, and explained that a "polite" woman never would ask where her hostess' outhouse was, but where her hollihock garden was.

As Barbara Chapman walked her property, she mentioned chores on her to-do list as well as future plans. She said she and her husband tossed about all sorts of names for the house and property.

"We thought of Windy Acres, Tree Acres," she said. But the couple decided on "The Farm" since that is what they have called it from the beginning.